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06/20/2012 10:58 am ETUpdated
Aug 20, 2012

Writing Tips: 6 Ways To Be A Better Wordsmith

By David Morley

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We are born writers in the sense that we born storytellers. Language is who we are to the world. Our ability to tell our story with clarity and panache will make the difference between being heard and being ignored.

Genius is the product of 10,000 hours of practice combined with talent and luck. But as a student moves through education they are required to specialize. By early adulthood the cast is set. Creative writing programs are a great way for aspiring writers to get those crucial hours practicing their craft. But the explosive growth of these programs in recent years has frequently led to the isolation of writing from other disciplines and ways of knowing.

The contributors to The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing [Cambridge University Press, $90.00] argue that imagination needs to be wired through intelligence; intelligence to be wired through imagination - through the practice of creative writing at every level of education and within every field of knowledge. They believe that a creative writing course should not only reflect the world; it should enact the world; or even open up possible new worlds. They argue that all writing is, at its best, creative writing.

Here are a few ideas these authors offer to writers who are tired of traditional forms, and want to explore new ways into creative writing.

We like to think that artistic genius, at least, feeds on solitude. It is not uncommon for new writers to worry that they will become less distinct, less original, if they spend too much time sharing ideas with their peers. But consider the case of Jorge Luis Borges. When he went to Europe as a young aspiring poet, he found his feet (and an education) in the tertulias of Madrid. Returning to his native city of Buenos Aires, he continued the habit. The almost nightly conversations he had with Adolfo Bioy Casares and other writers fed directly into his writing, and into theirs. If Latin America literature then went off in a direction not yet possible in Europe and North America, it is largely thanks to this unruly group of literary hybrids, who drew as much inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe and G.K. Chesterton as they did from Shakespeare and Verlaine. They gave each other the courage to be break conventions, question received ideas, and imagine the unimaginable.
- Maureen Freely